#RebelDay: A Powerful Way To Get Things Done

We frequently on-board new rebels, we constantly travel around the world, we start with new customers on a monthly basis, and we grasp expansion opportunities every few months.

So it is vital we evolve the way we work. Over the next few months, we’ll take you with us on this adventure—sharing our reflections, successes and fck-ups as we go. In this blog post, we share a lesson we learned recently.

Why #RebelDay?

Our team is constantly on the move. We travel to amazing locations to meet pioneers and clients almost every week. This is one of the delights of being a Corporate Rebel.

But it also makes it hard to synchronize our calendars. Even with only six of us, it’s extremely difficult to meet—given client engagements, travels, and dispersed locations. We tried, and figured out it wasn’t working properly.

So, we do what we normally do when things don’t run smoothly: we ran an experiment. We call it #rebelday.

What is it?

The experiment is simple. Every other week we block a day in our calendar to be together. We meet in person as a team, mostly in our office in Utrecht or Eindhoven (The Netherlands).

We’re quite ruthless in blocking our calendar. For example, we decline client engagements during those days because we think it’s important to be together at least once every two weeks. During those days we learn, share, and work together so we can be better during the other 9 days. By the way, we’ve noticed that saying “No” once in a while can be very powerful too!

The inspiration for #rebelday was drawn from a blog post, they described it eloquently: “We are not there for you on Mondays because that way, you get more out of us Tuesday through Friday.”

For us, the purpose of #rebelday is to grow as a team and to grow as an organization. Depending on the #rebelday, you might find us:

• updating on monthly goals

• sharing knowledge

• making decisions

• sharing feedback

• devising new business ideas

• discussing financials

• et cetera.

How does it work?

The process currently goes like this:

• We block a day in our calendar every other week. It’s a fixed day, so it’s easier to schedule other activities around it.

• On our public Slack community we use a private channel called #rebelday in which team members can add topics to the calendar of a specific day.

• During the day itself, we check off the topics one by one. The person that placed the topic on the agenda takes the lead on that topic.

• Once we’ve finished all the topics, we spend the rest of the day on other things, but still physically together.

• A rotating nominee posts decisions to the Slack channel for future reference.

• We finish the day (mostly) with a nice beer.

So, is the experiment successful? It’s too soon to say. Upfront we decided to run the experiment until the end of the year before evaluating it.

But, so far it seems to be working really well. The time we spend together is of high quality, we get more shit done, and we are more aligned. And in our current phase, this is extremely helpful.

Presently, we are focused on important decisions that need brainstorming, alignment, and decision-making. The fixed two-week rhythm helps us do this better. We move quicker, and we are more decisive.

More experiments coming soon..

Over the next few months we’ll share more of our experiments.

We learn from the best. We adapt their inspirations to our situation. We apply them through rigorous experimentation. And we evolve as we go. It’s what we enjoy doing.

Stay tuned for more.